Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture

Are we missing out on the full benefits of science and technology because of outdated ideas about copyright and patenting? Could the key to feeding the world be locked up in a company fridge somewhere? Open-source software has transformed the internet, underpinning the phenomenal growth of Google, Ebay and YouTube. What can science learn from this revolution? In our rush to protect intellectual property, have we damaged our capacity to deliver solutions for the critical issues of the 21st century?

In this lecture, John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons at Harvard Law School, will describe how existing social and legal infrastructures are choking science, and how we can create new ways to share research. Brian Fitzgerald, Head of the Law School at Queensland University of Technology, will discuss the success of open source in the information technology world, and the lessons for other fields of science.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: The program today comes from Melbourne and one of the Deakin Lectures held during 2007. It's about intellectual property rights, computers and the future, or to put it another way, how can innovators at last be allowed to get on with it and how can we, the public, make the most of useful knowledge, without being stung yet again for a dollar. One speakers include John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons - he's been based at the Berkman Centre at Harvard University. Professor Brian Fitzgerald, who qualified at Oxford and Harvard. He's a leader of Creative Commons and has been head of the Law School at the Queensland University of Technology. And Dr Richard Jefferson, founder and CEO of CAMBIA in Canberra. We start with John Wilbanks.

[applause]

John Wilbanks: Thanks for the kind introduction and thank you to the hosts for the invitation to be here, it's a pleasure to be in Australia. I'm going to talk about copyrights and innovation because Richard and Brian are going to talk about the ability to exploit the kind of information I'm talking about and access to the underlying data to that. My focus here really here is the way that we are communicating with each other and the way that impacts innovation. So let's talk about what I think innovation means. When I say innovation I mean new value created: things we didn't have that we have now, whether that is new music; Stravinsky is innovation to me. Whether that is a new drug; that's innovation, something that we didn't have that we now have. And so when we think about designing for innovation it's inherently designing for something that we don't have or we don't know about; it's designing for an unforeseen use of technology, of information, of invention, of data, of literature.

And one place that I like to start with is the idea of what's called Metcalf's law. Metcalf's law is a law that was written to describe for the exponential value that was created by putting computers into contact with one another. And it states that the value of compatibly communicating computer devices grows as the square of their number. Basically what that means is you get exponential value creation for every computer you connect into a network. And if you look at a graph of the value that was created by the internet it grows exponentially, and if you're familiar with exponential curves they're the ones that sort of start screaming towards the top right hand corner of the screen. They don't grow in an orderly linear fashion. And this happened because the internet was designed for unforeseen use. It wasn't designed to be perfect at whatever its use was at the moment that it was created. And it went from a few thousand computer hosts in the early 1990s to 350 million hosts at the beginning of this year. That's exponential growth just like Metcalf's law. And these principles now apply to information and content. I owe this phrase to Terry Cutler who said it last week at a conference in Surfers Paradise.

And one of the reasons that you can think about this is that the worldwide web now sits on top of the internet. It was also designed for unforeseen use. We have a very weak markup language, which is HTML, which lets us look at the actual source code of a page and make changes to it. This was not foreseen by the people who created the internet. It was enabled because there was a choice not to apply perfect control. I talked about compatibly communicating devices and that had to do with computers, but now people are communicating over the network, and so compatible communication is now a matter people communicating together, not just PCs. So it's humans, data and knowledge that now need to exist in a compatibly communicating network with the rights to innovate on top of that. And content is the bottleneck at this point, there's simply too much content. But only the wealthy can really attack this bottleneck. Pharmaceutical companies can attack this bottleneck, but even their money is not helping them win the battle. Pfizer spent $US4 billion on research and development last year. It did not help them achieve exponential growth in innovation creation, although it represents exponential growth in spending.

So one example of this - I work on Huntington's disease, it's a very traumatic and rare neurological degenerative disorder. In the circuit that operates on Huntington's disease (think of it as like a little electric circuit but for biological information) one protein in that circuit has 42,000 papers written about it. One process in that circuit has 129,000 papers written about it. And there are about 25 other things in the circuit. So it's great at one level because we know an enormous amount about it, but at another level it's cognitive overload. That one protein, 42,000 papers at a paper a day, 115 years to read every paper, assuming no new papers are written. And you get these sentences that are just fantastic (I'm going to read one). 'Transglutaminase catalyses cross-linking of Huntington into intra-nuclear inclusions'. This is exciting stuff and it's not exactly a creative expression; right. There's no other way to say this and have it be true. But copyright, which is an intellectual property right granted by God essentially, it comes down the minute you lift your pen from the paper, protects us because it's a creative expression that's been fixed in the medium. Even though it's not a particularly creative expression if I were to reverse that sentence it would no longer be true and it would no longer have value, but as an accident of the medium in which it's created the copyright controls the propagation of that fact of nature.

Now, this particular fact came from a long article. There is something we can do, we can apply mining techniques, we can apply software, not picks and shovels to extract this kind of information and build references between articles and databases, between articles and catalogues, between articles and people. Unfortunately copyright makes that illegal. It locks these facts up in paper like flies in amber never to be extracted. And on top of that to add insult to injury they're put into a format called pdf, which is basically a method of digitizing paper with all of its attendant limitations and legal requirements. It's very ironic that we have the capability of computation and we have chosen to digitize a two-dimensional format, that's what we've done. So if innovation is measured by output of drugs, as some would argue, by patents, or by an increase in the quality of life by those who cannot afford to increase their own quality of life, copyrights are not advancing innovation and I would argue in fact they are hampering innovation.

Now, I've been talking about biology and life sciences, but slow innovation hits and hurts us everywhere. I've been here for a week, it's clear that there are major resource issues in Australia to do with water, but the sharing of information around water and propagation is very likely to result in novel policies and theories that we haven't thought of yet, because the main point that I will keep coming back to is we haven't thought about the right answers yet. And if only we are allowed to think about them we probably aren't as likely to find the answers than if we let a lot of smart people think about them.

Power is another example, this is a problem in the United States, we have a company called Google. Google has now released four iterations of their computational infrastructure. Each time they've done it they've doubled their computing requirements. Now, they have not had some magic increase in the electric capabilities of the computers, so that means that their electricity requirements have now doubled four times. So we're back to this idea of exponential growth. And if you think about Moore's law, this method that every 18 months we're going to double our computational capacity, and you think about how cheap computers are getting, and you think about the electric requirements and the power requirements to run something like Google if they keep increasing their capabilities. So one way to think about exponential growth is to think about a sheet of paper. This is A4 paper, it's 0.1mm thick, and if you were to double it 30 times the thickness would reach the edge of the earth's atmosphere, and that's the rate of growth of electricity consumption that Google imposes, that all of us impose, and we don't even know how many of the doublings we've already gone through. We don't even know where we are on the scale.

And if you look at the growth rates, if you look at the curves of the graphs of data explosion, of energy consumption, of literature explosion in the sciences, of the number of net hosts, of the spending on drugs, all of them look exactly the same. The only one that doesn't look exactly the same is the number of innovations that come out of all of that. And so I think it's clear that we face an exponential set of problems but we don't have an exponential innovation capacity. And since we don't know how to create exponential increases in innovation or by definition, we would have done so, we need to think about what we can do to enable that innovation to emerge.

So I'm going to argue and close with a proposal for a set of principles. The first is that we need freedom to innovate, not simply freedom to operate, but freedom to innovate. So freedom to operate and freedom to innovate means a lot of things. It doesn't just mean a licence, it means that you know you have the rights to things that you want to use. You know that you won't get sued if you try to use them. It's a combination of law, knowledge and technology that represents the freedom to innovate. And the work that I'm doing at Creative and Science Commons is a part of that. The work that Richard is doing it at Cambia is a part of that, and the work that Brian is doing at QUT is a part of that. It's about the convergence of law, knowledge and technology to give the freedom to innovate to the people that need to innovate.

The second is the need for tools to collaborate because we don't really know what it actually takes to build collaborations in the modern virtual world. We hear about Second Life and virtual communities. I can't keep up with my email. So I don't really know what those tools for collaboration are, I just know that we don't have them. And last, we need the willpower of the funders of research, particularly the government, but also the private and the corporate funders of research which are very important, to understand that the actual releasing of some controls is much more likely to lead to an explosion, the Metcalf's law, the exponential growth, by allowing the compatible communication of the kinds of knowledge that we're creating. And my hope is that if we can do this that we can begin to achieve some of that exponential growth in our innovation capacity and achieve some of the same value explosion for people that we've had for computers. Thank you.

[applause]

Robyn Williams: Thank you so much. Brian Fitzgerald has seen the best and worst of copyright management. He's led the introduction of Creative Commons into Australia. He's also campaigned against the onerous copyright provisions of the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement. Brian will discuss the success of open source in the information technology world and the lessons for other fields of science and technology. He was formerly head of the Law School at the Queensland University of Technology and earlier this year was appointed as a specialist research professor in the area of intellectual property and innovation. Would you please welcome Brian Fitzgerald.

[applause]

Brian Fitzgerald: Thank you very much Robyn. Three things I'd like to float; free our data; unlock our democratic heritage; open our public digital archive. Why? Well what I want to talk a little bit about is access to public sector information. As John has spoken about, and many of you already know all of this stuff, we have got a new digital landscape that people inhabit, utilise to access and construct knowledge. We talk about peer-to-peer user generated collaboration and peer production, wireless, mobile, social networks, semantic web, web 2.0, online communities, metadata, folksonomies and so on and so on. An interesting report from the UK cabinet office called The Power of Information, written by Mayo and Steinberg, draws a lot of this together, particular in the PSI, the public sector information context, and explains that we're not just passive receptors anymore, as we quite often say, but we're also contributors and generators of not only information and knowledge but also policy and general community discourse or conversation.

So we know we have this new technology and culture in the digital landscape. We also know that in recent years the law, particularly the law around copyright has seen some innovation as well. So, one of the fundamental principles of copyright is that you need permission of the copyright owner to do things unless you've got some sort of exception under law or some other permission to utilise the content. We know just by using the digital environment we automate the potential for copyright infringement. By mere use we engage in acts that could come within the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.

One of the biggest innovations that I think that has occurred, and I'm self interested here as Robyn mentioned in my introduction, is the development of what is called 'open content licensing', a simple yet rudimentary legal vehicle borrowed to some extent from the free software movement. The idea is that we should give the permission in advance for copyright use where the copyright owner is willing to do so. Is it such a difficult thing to merely stamp or somehow communicate along with the information the rights to access and reuse the copyright content that I am willing to share?

There's many types of access that people talk about. We know there's open access, open to all, permission given in advance through something like an open licence usually to reproduce and communicate to the public. Yet we might also call sharing within a secure community or an access federation like we're building amongst the Australian universities, a sense of open access as well or open sharing. My particular interest is to stimulate discussion about open access to government and public sector information. We know that access is a key driver of social, cultural, and economic innovation. As John highlighted having a diverse array of sources to find new ways of doing things, whether it be in health, water, education, across the board is incredibly important.

In 2005 the Treasurer, Honourable Peter Costello, announced that the Australian Bureau of Statistics would release its data for free was a fundamental move in access to public sector information. In 2004 the Prime Minister announced that Australia would have, and is in the process of building, an accessibility framework to underpin the way that we share publicly funded knowledge. In January 2004 the Australian government signed onto the oeCD's declaration on access to research data from publicly funded research. One of the cornerstones of that declaration is that there should be a sense of openness and sharing where appropriate of publicly funded data and knowledge. Late last year in 2006 we saw the release of the PMSEIC, the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council's report called From Data to Wisdom, which once again a key recommendation six called for fair and equitable access to publicly funded research.

So there's been a lot of movement and a number of very key declarations, both overseas and in Australia about access to publicly funded research. That much is really not in dispute. But when we come to public sector information we really do stand at a very important time. Much of the information held by government is covered by government copyright including compilations of data. Much of the copyright is inactive. Even where cleared for privacy and security reasons it's not shared with the public because no facility to licence it on a large scale, or because a rent-seeking charging model is still in place. Contrast that with the notions of maximizing value, not protection, or the value of information is in its use. Quite often we think of closing the gate and seeking the rent rather than releasing the data, or the information, and in this case publicly funded, our own democratic heritage, to sponsor further innovation which as the ABS will tell you opens up new revenue streams and new ways of doing things. So instead of just thinking about charging a dollar to one hundred people upfront, can we think about opening the data to a million people and maybe having five very profitable businesses arise from that.

So we do stand at a very important point. And a report that I would like to highlight is recently released by the Queensland government called Access to Government Information and Open Content Licensing, a report that I'm close to and acknowledge certainly an interest in. Eighty-five per cent of government material in this report it's claimed which focuses on spatial information, which in itself is information related to location. Location based information is said to be at least 80% of the information we have in government. Eighty-five per cent of government material could be released on an open access model. New content licensing models provide a facility for whole-of-government generic licensing. Stamp the material with the conditions of use, licence in advance and let people and machines search and discover and reuse it online. It's been considered by many agencies; the Victorian government; the Queensland government; the federal government, but we could do better.

It's interesting that in 1911 there is a treasury minute on record from the UK which was adopted in Australia in 1912, a time I gather when Alfred Deakin was probably still in politics, which said that, 'Although the government owns copyright in many, many things, there are certain kinds of information that while the government would still retain a copyright it would allow full and free reproduction'. That treasury minute which dates back in heritage to an earlier minute of 1887 in the UK is very much the stuff of what we're trying to articulate today in terms of opening up these archives and allowing open access.

Importantly, about a week ago the Online Communication Council released details of the national information sharing strategy, which has as its focus the sharing of information between governments, between agencies, and with the community breaking down the silos that provide barriers to information integration and searchability, which are the mobilising factors or enablers in the information world. It will focus also on licensing. A better response to things like Cyclone Larry, the tsunami, national and community emergencies can be assisted by this kind of activity. 'Free our data' is a term that I've taken from the United Kingdom. There's a great blog that's been set up, launched from an article that was published in the Guardian newspaper, I think it was September 2006, called Free our data. I'd just like to say and conclude my thoughts in this way. We the people of this network information society consider that we should have fair and equitable access to the publicly funded knowledge we have invested in. We require a licence or permission given in advance to reproduce and communicate to the public such material, at very least for non-commercial research and educational reasons. Free our public content in the name of democracy, creativity and innovation. Thank you.

[applause]

Robyn Williams: Richard Jefferson says that biological innovation has transformed humanity and still has the potential to improve the lives of the nearly four billion people in the world who live on daily incomes lower than the price of a latte. However the biotechnology revolution of the last 20 years has led to the tools for innovation becoming locked up. He's created the Bios, that's the Biological Open Source Initiative to provide a toolkit for biological innovation that is freely available to researchers. He's the founder and CEO of Cambia biospace in Canberra. But let me just give you one of his delicious quotations. He says 'If you don't know what's out there you can't know whether you can deliver your own invention and ideas. You can't build on others' work. Worldwide innovation depends on clarity and transparency of patent rights.' But the point is that the Journal Nature of great fame, Nature Biotechnology agrees.

In a recent editorial focusing on Cambia's patent work called Patently Transparent it said 'it is estimated that under-exploitation of technical information costs European industry alone 20 billion dollars each year simply because the inability to access relevant patent information results in the duplication of effort or the creation of products that overlap with prior art. Cambia's patent lens is a giant leap in the right direction', which is why of course Richard has been on the cover of certain magazines looking like a cross between Thomas Edison and Crocodile Dundee. Would you please welcome Richard Jefferson.

[applause]

Richard Jefferson: Thank you very much, I'm confusing honoured to be here. In spite of the accent Seppo [phonetic] till I die, I live in Canberra and I'm Australian. And so what I'll be speaking to you about is part of my perception of the role that Australia can take to take the initiatives that John and Brian have discussed to the next level in which the true innovators, that is the people who are solving problems in their life and in the lives of others, can actually be empowered. It seems in some ways that my role here is the clean-up of batter. If I can't skip the Seppo [phonetic], I can't skip the metaphors, is to talk about that last jump, the jump between the conceptual, the vision, the acquisition and then balancing of the knowledge that's out there with the pressing need of a true innovator to solve a problem. There's a misconception amongst scientists that they solve problems and that science solves problems - it does not. Science is an enormously powerful tool for answering questions.

Once the questions are answered, and how the questions are answered, determines whether it can be incorporated within a solution. But innovation per se happens by people. Problems are solved by people that either experience the problems or have themselves been appointed or chosen to be appointed as the proxy solvers of problems by people. Innovation is about people. Now all of the science in the world in the absence of galvanizing problem-solvers is just so much career development. So it's almost as if all of the work you've talked about in the absence of that final step to ensure that we've galvanized the ability of people who experience problems or who sense opportunities, in the absence of that empowerment is sadly lacking. So what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about why I think our innovation system, and in particular our public sector, has dropped the ball and to speculate on where the ball is, how it needs to be picked up and moved forward.

How many people in the audience have actually owned patents or have written patents? Okay. And how many people should've put their hands up that didn't? Okay, thank you, one honest man. A patent is often thought of like people think of copyright as a right that you have to do something. My limited understanding of copyright would be if I write something down and there is this divine copyright on this I actually have the right, I've in a sense accorded myself the licence to do with it as I will. If I wish to copy it, hence the name, I can do so. Now a patent is something completely different. A patent, the only God is in the patent office, and believe me I've been there and he's not dressed up well. If you come up with an invention, say tried sequencing of a gene - no, let's say a real invention, a mouse trap of some quality or - -

Robyn Williams: A bionic prostate.

Richard Jefferson: He saw me have the two beers in the reception earlier and he's just wondering can I wind him up quickly - you bet. A bionic prostrate what a great idea, Robyn. Anyway, before I was so germanely interrupted, here's the question; With a patent do you have the right to practice whatever is patented? First let me walk you through the process for the two or three of you who don't have patents. If you have an idea that you conceive of as a new invention and you would like to secure a patent on it, first the vast majority of people who do secure patents don't know why they would want to secure a patent. There's some vague notion of oh there's something about invention and money and things. But let's imagine you do wish to secure a patent and you submit, with the help of your ever ready lawyers a specification often ranging 20-50, sometimes hundreds, sometimes many hundreds of pages - for the mousetrap perhaps a bit less, and you submit it to the patent office. The intention of a patent system is to do the converse of the conundrum that John described with pdfs, instead of the new technology providing you with an old response what we've got is the other way around, in a patent what we have is a very old system trying to cope with a new reality.

Now if we submit this invention to the patent office what is the consequence of that? Well, first it goes into a queue, a very, very, very long queue. That queue can actually last - and I kid you not, I heard you laugh sir, that queue can last for longer than the length of the patent. So there are some, in the United States, for instance in business method patents the pendency, the time from which you submit a patent to the time you can expect it to be laughed out of court is about 15 years. Now why was a patent invented in the first place? It was to disclose. In the early 1800s the patent system, the modern patent system, much of which can be laid at the feet of Thomas Jefferson, my eponymic forbearer, was there specifically because the main mechanism of securing advantage was secrecy. If you had developed a new metal alloy that would make an excellent spring for a clock, the way that you would seek commercial advantage from that is to keep it secret, but the perception of the time was that science and the useful arts, as they were quaintly termed, would progress much better based on full disclosure of information. Now that seems very logical.

So how do you convince an inventor of an excellent alloy for a spring to disclose that? You say well we'll make an embarrassing bit a compromise. We'll grant a state right of limited monopoly over that description, that formulation in exchange for you telling people about it with the idea that people will then build upon that and say ah, but if you add antimony here instead of bronze, ... bronze has and you can go forth and make ye a better chronometer. And it worked, it was actually a pretty cluey idea that if you give someone a limited monopoly they will disclose, that disclosure serves as the basis for future progress. And that was very important when the turnaround time of disclosure through the learned literature was decades, not minutes. Now, what have we got now? We've got a system where virtually any concept in the life sciences and nanotechnology that you come with, no matter how good you are is likely to be come up with by someone else within days, months, at best years, but certainly not decades.

So where then is the justification for a very long exclusionary right? Now I started this with the idea that you don't actually have the right in patents to do what you can in copyright. If I have written my notes down, had I written notes down I would have the right to copy them. Had I written this patent specification, and even aged that I am been granted a patent in a timely fashion, all I could do with that is clear the pitch. All I could really do is stop someone else from practising this invention. A patent is a spoiler device, it's a device for saying no, not yes, because I can't even practice my patent.

Let's imagine I notice the enormous waste of having four legged chairs and I conceive that a three-legged chair would decrease 25% of the production cost of the chair, so I've seen no three-legged chairs so I file a patent. The patent examiner stunned at this revelatory concept has granted me a patent on the three-legged chair. So I go down to Park Hill and I start setting up a factory to manufacture the three-legged chair. And I'm doing quite well with this, and they're beautiful are there are many forms of the three-legged chair, and who should knock at the door, not but a customer, but a lawyer saying I'm sorry you may not produce this chair, and I say nonsense I have the patent. He says well that's alright but we have the patent on chairs. Excuse me? Well, chairs. It says right here the device for keeping one's bum off the floor, I'm sorry that's our concept. But, but, but - yes that's right, off the floor. But, but, but - and the three-legged chair is destined in fact for infamy because I can't produce it without permission from the owner of the chair patent.

Now, this somewhat fatuous example is mirrored by thousands, tens of thousands, and in fact hundreds of thousands of examples in our daily life. You're probably familiar with the human genome, look in the mirror, what you see is largely the product of the human genome. Actually I gave this in Tasmania, it was really funny.

[laughter]

Not bad. Oh God I forgot I signed the release form!

[laughter]

Nonetheless the issue is this, the human genome is responsible at some level for quantifying much of what we are, and yet over 35% of it now is subject to granted patents in much of the world. How could this be? Well let me pose you an interesting question. What if that patent granted to nn-nn-nn in Boston is over a particular gene that is associated with the p53. And in fact I'm confident, though I haven't looked, that p53 is subject to - is it, more than a few. The greed goes on. It turns out that many of these are not just patented once, not twice, but more than a few times where many claimants will aspire to ownership of the p53 gene, which you all have in various forms I'm sure.

Now what does that mean? Let's imagine an exceptional researcher at the Peter Mac comes up with a fascinating lead for a cancer diagnostic or a Huntington's disease diagnostic. What it will mean is that even if they file a patent on this, and it is a true invention for a diagnostic tool, does it mean that they can either practice it or even transfer that capability to the private sector? Absolutely not. What it does mean is that the enormous labyrinth of other related rights owned by other parties as spoilers must be navigated to get this out to the real world. Now that's almost the definition of inefficiency. When you have to navigate any idea into delivery through such a complex maze it is staggeringly inefficient. And until last Thursday it was impossible to know in Australia what patents were out there.

Did you realise that in spite of the fact that the patent grant is given in exchange for disclosure of what you have invented that in Australia until Thursday you couldn't actually search Australian patents from machine-searchable text. You couldn't say show me patents that have p53 and Boston and you and your horse in it. You couldn't find it, but now you can. Strangely enough the agency that did that was not the patent office but a scrappy little non-profit that believes in Australian innovation. The first key, as Robyn alluded to in getting innovation out is total transparency. If we wish to see efficiency of the delivery of the creative minds within Australia and overseas we must have a transparent fabric with which to work.

Now, in closing what I'd like to do is draw a metaphor that I had used in previous lectures that I think actually works. The nice thing about having given previous lectures is you're not the test bed. There was a lecture I gave in Yale, April last year, a lecture called Map Makers, Mariners, Shipwrights and Sailors, and it was about the metaphor of innovation and information. Interestingly enough what John and Brian are talking about is the enormous importance of getting to the sea coast. If you look at the mercantile empires between 1400 and 1800, mostly from Europe, what you'll find is that all of them fairly obviously were maritime empires. Now the first thing that they needed was access to the sea. But the next thing they needed was to be able to navigate that ocean and actually sail it. By navigate it they would learn where to go, where was dangerous, where was not. To sail it they would be able to conduct commerce. And as the technology, both of cartography and of seafaring improved, the actual margins that were required, the actual costs of the venturing forth dropped enormously and the margins that were acceptable were smaller.

Now, I started out with this kind introduction about the four billion people who can't afford a latte here in Melbourne, they are innovators, and yet they're innovators without the capability of cartography or sailing. What we have to do now is build on the work that John and Brian have talked about. They've got us to the sea coast. Imagine as old physics professors would say test your hypothesis at the limit cases. Let's imagine open access to data works now, every piece of data in the world is available at no cost to everyone. Then what? We have to take that data, build it into a facility for the true innovators to proceed. We need cartography of the shoals of the reefs. We need the maritime capability that very often the small-medium enterprise private sector provides. What we have to do is drive the cost of innovation down, the confidence up, and that will happen only with total transparency of this very, very Byzantine patent system. So what I'd like to do is leave it with that so that we can have a discussion. Thank you.

[applause]

Robyn Williams: You mentioned PowerPoint just now. I of course have an approximate relationship to IT and the other day we did a report about PowerPoint concerning one's perception and how amazing it is that 10 years ago they found out that if you have all those words and all those spoken words you can pay attention only to one at a time and therefore you get a complete loss of meaning from this thing called PowerPoint, which I introduced as 'PowerPoint.' Next thing I get an email saying why are you doing a product placement, didn't you know PowerPoint is a brand name? Well I had no idea, I thought it was a word like typewriter. I use a typewriter to write my scripts and have done since 1972 and it saves paper, you just turn over press releases and write on the other side. My paper costs have been zero. So when someone attacks me as mentioning PowerPoint I'm absolutely astonished to find out there is something else. In fact I was referring to the fact that Al Gore used PowerPoint. It turns out he used something else. Any questions? Snow Barlow, yes over there in the middle, I knew you'd have one.

Snow Barlow: Thank you. I've, for the last six years or so have been recording free and public lectures at Melbourne Uni, Monash Uni, and quite a few other places with complete agreement of the organisation and the speakers and for playing on community radio. Now it's been going very well because they all want the event publicized and they want what they're talking about publicized and they've been very pleased with it. But this year they've all gone into panic mode. With the new regulations, something or other has come out, they've all been asking me what does it all mean. The universities can't tell me what it all means, so I don't know, but they're all clammed up, I can't record anything at all this year because of the effect of new rules.

Brian Fitzgerald: If you've got the permission of anyone who's got copyright in the material, whether the universities are trying to claim some sort of copyright there and there's some dispute it could be an issue. I suppose the key issue that I mentioned in my talk is quite often we get permission to put things up but we don't think about the permission to reuse downstream and I think that's incredibly important as well. It doesn't solve your problem. I'll talk to you afterwards about your issue and if there's some light I can shed on it I'm more than happy to do so. But even you getting those permissions and putting them up what rights do people then have to reutilise or communicate it to someone else? They're really important things, particularly in a user-generated digital environment where people actually refer things to each other in sort of an online community fashion so that we know things are out there.

Robyn Williams: John.

John Wilbanks: The other aspect is that the law is constructed in such a way - no offence to you as a lawyer, is that the guild excludes non-lawyers from conversations about the law. And so one of the benefits of standard licensing is that (a) You don't have to read 1500 contracts to know what's going on, but (b) You can also use icons, you can use simple human readable language to communicate intent. And so Brian and I have both looked into the Creative Commons Licensing System, it's a system designed for non-lawyers to engage in the copyright debate, so the benefits of standard licensing is that they're free and that they're standard but they create a vocabulary for people that might not otherwise be able to engage in the discussion and say I'd like this to get publicized but I'd like to retain some rights to it along the way.

Robyn Williams: Snow.

Snow Barlow: Roughly about two-thirds of the research money stumped up in the world is stumped up by business, probably a third by government. In broad view-we can argue about that. But what will happen if we tell Pfizer if they stump up their four billion and they won't own it after that?

John Wilbanks: I'm not quite sure that's the proposal. I mean in the US 28 billion a year goes into health R&D from the taxpayer which swamps Pfizer's four billion. And I'm not talking about owning the output. We're not talking about the sailing. We're talking about the basic elements of research. So the primary output of the taxpayer funding in the United States is papers, each paper of which represents a very small piece in an incredibly large and complex puzzle. And the problem is that those puzzle pieces are designed in such a way that you cannot assemble them right now and copyright is the engine that locks them up.

Currently I'm in fairly detailed negotiations with the heads of libraries of four of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world who are dealing with 15 to 20 different licensing regimes for literature and they can't do this kind of text mining internally. So these are powerful consumers of information and they don't have the rights, even as customers who pay the publishers to do this. And one of the reasons why there's resistance is that you know some of the top publishers currently have profit margins somewhere between Microsoft and Pfizer on information that they didn't create and that they didn't edit. And copyright is the legal regime on which that's constructed. So the people that really have a problem with this are the commercial and society publishers of scholarly literature, not the companies that are trying to build sail boats.

Richard Jefferson: Coming to another aspect of your point about the funding for research as you know better than many that there's only two ways to deal with becoming a profitable company, that's make more money or spend less. It's really as simple as that in many ways, though there's nuances. The challenge is is that four billion that you say they spend on research, is it well spent? Is it necessary that they spend four billion? Because if they for instance get the same output with three billion that's one billion extra profit. Now if they get the same output with two billion that's starting to look like real money.

Now, my assertion is that there are grotesque inefficiencies in both private and public sector expenditures because the actual platforms and tools of innovation both are expensive and they're insecure. And from a long term timeline of investment insecurity is worse than upfront costs, not knowing what's coming down the pike, so what we have to do is build a sense of confidence in an investment community. Now the real investment community I'm interested in are the small bank co-ops in East Africa or in South Asia, but they have even more of a challenge because they can't lay it off against blue chips. They actually have even more exposure than internal Pfizer monies or Pfizer shareholder monies. So what I would suggest is that the efficiencies of the tools and platforms of innovation have the two modes of value creation; one is to decrease the costs of innovation; the other is to increase dramatically the confidence of investment. So as John says we're not actually pounding Birkenstocks on the table here saying you know it's all for free. It's really about covenants of behaviour and saying well listen there is something pretty competitive about the tools and platforms but we are treating them as if they should all be gained for monetized outputs. Our assertion, I think all of us would be that there's much more to be gained by cooperation and only invoking competition when it's strictly necessary. It's efficient.

John Wilbanks: And one just real quick metaphor with that is if you think about your computers. If you're using an Apple or a Linux machine, which if you use the web you probably are, there are core commands that are inside 70% of the machines that run the internet and they come from the Unix operating system, things like printf is how you spool a file to a printer. Imagine if printf were patented and you needed a patent licence every time you sent a print command, that's the situation in biology and that's not a very good way to spur innovation because it's a misunderstanding and a misapprehension of the fundamental aspects of what you've done. And even worse at least in computers you invented that thing. In biology all you did was describe what already existed. Sorry.

Robyn Williams: Thank you. A question over here.

Audience member: With regards to copyright and patent reform recently we've seen for example the major US media companies proposing through WIPO a broadcast copyright and the major US IT companies aggressively going towards software patents in the European Union. We've seen the actual public sector and small private sector, innovators and content producers arguing against that, but the major corporations have generally had their way. How do you think we should deal with that, I guess.

John Wilbanks: Well I mean I'm not sure it's quite that monolithic. I mean IBM has basically issued a massive general non-assertion of patents. Intel's chief policy council, I read an editorial, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal this week saying that the patent reformat in the United States needed to go forward. So I think it's not a clear-cut situation. It sort of depends on which company you're talking about. Where there is monolithic movement in the United States is in the scientific publishing industry. The scientific publishers are walking around Washington DC with a pre-filled law suit that they're going to drop in the hopper the minute that the National Institute of Health mandates open access to taxpayer funded research papers. Right, that's where you've got monolithic opposition.

The opposition to bringing balance back to the United States in international copyright law that's where we've got monolithic opposition. I mean the company that owns the rights to Casablanca doesn't want to stop making money on it. And it's a real shame that Einstein's later papers and Watson and Cricks later papers on the structure of DNA are not in the public domain. And you've got to go back to pre-germ theory biology to get to the public domain in the life sciences because of the essentially infinite nature of copyright. And that's where there's really monolithic opposition in my experience is not so much on patent side in IT, but copyright it's incredible how much unanimity there is among the companies that this is a good thing.

Robyn Williams: Upstairs we have an overflow of at least 50 people and a messenger from on high is Niall Byrne who brings a question.

Niall Byrne: Yes. My question from upstairs relates to telephones and the iPhone, and the questioner mentions that congress is inquiring into the way that Apple has licensed its new technology solely to one telecom company, and wonders if you have any comments or concerns on companies locking up a kind of technology in that way.

Richard Jefferson: They picked a real loser of a network provider.

[laughter]

A great toy though!

John Wilbanks: I'm going to quote one of my former colleagues and one of my good friends, Jonathon Zittrain, who's a professor at Harvard and at Oxford, and he gave a brilliant speech a couple of weeks ago about the generative nature of the internet and the generative nature of the PC and the ability to generate the new technologies and new connections, and he showed a beautiful shot of an old online service called Prodigy, which is one of these old walled gardens like the early AOL on the internet. And then he mapped the iPhone picture to it and the interface is exactly the same. There are buttons that say things like 'media' and 'sport', whereas the internet lets you decide what those things are yourself. And so I think between the choice to go to one carrier, which I understand has already been cracked, and so they believe you can already, if you know where to look, find the unlock codes for the iPhone and do an enormous number of things that Apple didn't want you to do with it.

My thinking is that the iPhone will be something that it wasn't designed for because all of the really cool advances in technology tend to be things that we didn't expect. One of my shticks is a picture of a giant amphibious monorail, because if you look through sort of paleo-history of science: flying cars, domed cities and aquatic monorails are dominant themes of techno-futurism. And they're kind of not what we have.

[laughter]

Richard Jefferson: But they are in Queensland.

[laughter]

John Wilbanks: They weren't in the hotel I was staying in.

Richard Jefferson: No, no, we were all just at a meeting in Developer's Paradise, they're just south of Brisbane.

John Wilbanks: But certainly so I think that with the iPhone is that you know the attempts to control typically are broken pretty quickly by those who don't like control and it's just a matter of not demonizing them. And there's a real problem with sort of you're either with us or you're with the pirates, which is my formulation, it's a reformulation and a remix of something our president says. And I think it's going to turn out to work as well as a way of dealing with complex real world problems as it has in other settings unfortunately.

Robyn Williams: Viagra was completely unexpected, wasn't it?

John Wilbanks: Yeah, Viagra was a side-effect. It was a heart pressure drug that failed to achieve efficacy in its designated area but there were unusual side-effects reported.

[Laughter]But the other piece that I want to bring to this is a lot of the discussions sort of presume that we continue to have infinite expansions in storage and bandwidth. And I come back, I mean I meant what I said about power, because we're going to run out of power long before we run out of accelerations and processor speed and lower cost. Our counsel at Science Commons, there's this beautiful theory that we're in a pre-Cambrian explosion of information where there sort of seems to be infinite resources to capture, store and render and transfer data, and that we're going to hit a power crisis. There are some other aspects that might limit this. But we're going to hit a crisis at some point that makes it very difficult to just keep storing everything. And if you think about the One Laptop Per Child initiative it's not based on power coming on the grid, but it also means you can't store exabytes of data on a little machine that you power with a hand crank. And so we may well have to face some sort of evolutionary phase where we start to think about what we store, why and how and when it's important, because storing your entire genome might not be as important as storing the diffs [phonetic] in your genome from someone else's or the parts of the genome that have been measured.

So I think it's important to always remember that we are in a situation where it appears as if we have infinite computational resources but those resources are rate-limited by major resources that are non-diginal and in particular it's power. And if you've ever been in Silicon Valley in the summer time they have rolling blackouts - and this is the most connected place on earth. They have rolling blackouts where HP Labs goes dark for a day because they can't provide enough juice to all the companies that are out there. And as long as our innovations are based on power we have a very significant Achilles tendon.

Robyn Williams: A final question, Niall.

Niall Byrne: If we look perhaps 10 or 20 years into the future how, if we take up your individual ideas will my and my family's life have been transformed?

John Wilbanks: Twenty years ago think about trying to tell someone about Wikipedia. There's going to be this massive online-distributed encyclopaedia which is going to be more consulted than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and it's going to be written by total amateurs and it'll be free. Right, you'd be thought to be completely psychotic, and I think that's what happens when you have a generative system, which is what the internet and the web are, they're systems that don't apply controls and you can build - let's say if you had a humming bird the engineers would say that theoretically there's no way it could possibly fly. And my hope would be that if Brian's work and Richard's work and our work at the Science Commons come together is that if the cost of doing this innovation comes down enough that the 100 million kids who are going to get laptops in the next three years from the One Laptop per Child project have something to work with and have some rights to take advantage of that because that's a lot of smart kids that have no preconceived notions about how this world is supposed to work. And they're going to invent things that we had never thought of that are just as weird to us today as a giant online collaborative free encyclopaedia which assumes all of these technological inventions would've been in 1987 when remote controls for cable had cables themselves.

Richard Jefferson: Perhaps as the scientist on the podium I'd actually go the other way, Niall, and I'd say that the thing that your children would see out of this in 20 years is more of a sense of self worth and decency, because the inequities in the world will be substantially less. I mean all of us through our daily lives one way or another are trying to mitigate our sense of worthlessness or a lack of a sense of purpose, and so will your children be. Part of that has to do with reconciling our own privilege with others lack of privilege and it goes to the core of what John's talking about, those are not poor people, they're innovators that have yet to manifest their opportunities. So your children are going to be looking a way to feel decency and kindness is not the exception to the rule but possibly the default from which interesting things can spring. And we hope that if we achieve what we're talking about, it's not about a technological future, it's about a human future and a humane future, and our sense of self-worth will be embodied very much in the values that other people can then achieve for themselves.

Robyn Williams: Thank you.

[applause]

You've been listening to a Science Show special on who owns idea and how to face the future. It was part of the 2007 Deakin lecture series at the University of Melbourne. You heard John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons, Professor Brian Fitzgerald from the Queensland Institute of Technology and Dr Richard Jefferson, from Cambia Bios in Canberra.